A series of measures, including the Sun City Project, the Low Carbon City Autonomous Regulation of Tainan, and the Sun City Project 2.0, have indicated the success in green policy for Tainan, Taiwan, with the total accumulated volume of alternatives exceeding 1.6GW. Tainan is also leading in the installed capacity of solar among the entire country as of June 2020.
Tainan launched the “Sun City Project” and the “Low Carbon City Autonomous Regulation of Tainan” in 2011, then initiated the “Sun City Project 2.0” in 2019, with a goal of reaching 2GW of installed capacity by 2022. Amidst the rapid growth of installed solar capacity and alternative capacity, the solar alternatives in Tainan had reached to 6,933 at the end of July 2020, where the 5 major rooftop alternatives had arrived at 643MW, and the 5 major ground alternatives are currently at 983MW, totaling 1.6GW of alternatives, which is ranked first in Taiwan, and has been recognized by international green and peace organizations, as well as domestic and foreign companies such as Google.
In order to achieve a green supply chain, over 242 enterprises, including Google, Apple, and TSMC, have joined the “RE100” initiative, and spare no efforts in adopting 100% renewable energy, where Google had achieved the objective back in 2017, and Apple managed to use 100% green energy in April 2018. These companies have also asked the supply chain to follow up on the particular direction, which has been expanded to the industry chain regarding the use of green electricity.
Google announced in January 2019 that the company would be purchasing 10MW of green power from Tainan, making it the first enterprise to purchase renewable energy from Taiwan after the approval of the amended Electric Industry Act, which is also the first green transaction for Google in Asia. Should the project complete according to the schedule, Google will be able to provide power from the water surface solar at the fish farm of Tainan to the data center located in the Changhua coastal area.
The importance of renewable energy increases alongside the requirement in a green supply chain, and the government has stipulated green energy targets accordingly, which consists of elevating the ratio of renewable energy to 20% by 2025 and a total of 20GW in installed capacity of solar. Various sites have also drafted different plans, where the 500MW large scale solar plant that is expected for establishment in 2025 by TPC is equivalent to 2.5% of the 20GW target promoted by the government, with an anticipated annual power generation volume of roughly 650 million kWh.
Taiwan has established 4.246 million kWh of installed capacity for solar as of the end of June, which includes the 209K kWh from TPC and the 4.037 million kWh from private sectors, where the 2.71624 billion kWh of power generation accumulated from January to June has surpassed the 2.6 billion kWh in the entire 2017. However, according to the survey of EnergyTrend under TrendForce, the progress for system installation in the downstream market of Taiwan is current trailing, with merely 410MW installed between January and May, and may not achieve the 2.2GW target for 2020.
Note: the 5 major rooftop solar items include sun roof, sun public house, sun community, green plant, and agricultural canopy; the 5 major ground solar items include land for salt industry, water space, landfill, land for green energy, and green equipment.
(Cover photo source: pixabay)